FUSION Setup Guide

(updated November 28, 2010)

My reason for installing Fusion was my demand for a Mac II emulation with at least 256 colours and a working sound system.

Basilisk II does a fine job running System 7.1, but unfortunately some of my old games don't play sound. With Fusion they do, but Fusion can only be run from DOS or a DOS based Windows system. If you own a fairly fast Intel or AMD machine with a dual core cpu and 2GHz clock speed or better, you may find that Fusion with DOSBOX works at a reasonable speed.

DOSBox will only make use of one of your cpu cores, but as it occupies it up to 100%, it is a good idea to have some computing power left over for your host system.

DOSBox is available for several host systems, including OS X. My “newest” OS is WIN XP, so I set up Fusion with DOSBox and Windows XP.

If you own some old hardware you might instead set up a FAT32 partition with WIN95, WIN98 or Millennium and start Fusion there, because it is much faster then.

This is a guide to setting up Fusion, a Macintosh emulator from Emulators, Inc., in Windows using DOSBox. DOSBox is available for several host systems, and this guide can probably be consulted for use with something other than Windows. The guide is based on this message board topic.

Before you begin, you will need a few things:

• The most recent version of DOSBox
• FUSION PC 3.0 from Emulators, Inc.
• A Macintosh 1 Mb ROM image. Basilisk II users can use the same ROM. Otherwise, you'll have to download one online.
• A Macintosh System CD

Locate the file “dosbox-0.74.conf”. In Windows 7 this file is located at \Users\“yourusername”\AppData\Local\DOSBOX\

• At line 49 or so edit: memsize=31. This tells DOSBox to allocate 31MB of RAM. It is not recommended to set this higher, anyway 63 will be the absolute maximum.

At the end of the file, paste something like these lines:

• mount c d:\Fusion30
• mount d e:\ -t cdrom
• C:
• setup

Explanation of these settings:
Line 1 mounts your directory Fusion30 on drive D as drive C in DOSBox.
Line 2 mounts your CD/DVD drive E as CD-ROM drive D in DOSBox
Line 3 tells DOSBox to go to the C drive, created in Line 1.
Line 4 calls Fusion´s setup screen.

• Copy your ROM file to your Fusion directory. The file should be named “any_name”.rom (any 8 characters.rom)
• Start DOSbox

In the FUSION setup screen:

• Click your mouse on the screen. If you want your mouse back in Windows press CTRL and F10 at the same time. This switches the mouse between DOSBox and Windows.
• Click ADVANCED and select your desired machine, lets say a Quadra700 with a Startup Sound 2
• Click VIDEO and select VESA_R8M.FVD
• Click FLOPPY and set it to OFF (unless you really got one and mounted it in dosbox0.74.conf)
• Click DEVICES, then OPTIONS, then CREATE HARDFILE, type something reasonable, the files should be named something.hf0 to somewhat.hf9, press Return when finished. Use the arrows for setting the size to the desired one. Click CREATE, then EXIT.
  

The file you just created should be displayed in the “Available Hardfiles” box. If not press SELECT and do so.

• Click ROM FILE and select your ROM.
• Click SOUND and set like this: Sound Hardware to BLASTER, Port to 220, IRQ to 7, DMA8 to 1 and DMA16 to 5
• Click CD-ROM and set CD-ROM Support to D, Boot Priority to CD-ROM
• ADB, SCSI and NETWORK can be left untouched right now.

The Apple Command Key is mapped to the right control key on the PC keyboard.

• Click MEMORY and adjust it to 16MB or so.

Now its time to insert your Mac System Software CD and finally click LAUNCH EMULATOR.

The emulated Macintosh starts and asks if you want to initialise the volume you created above. Do that. Installation will proceed than. If you are finished, shut down the Mac and close DOSBox by pressing CTRL+F9.

If you would like to copy some files to your new volume, mount the .hfx file, you have created in Fusion setup, with Basilisk II or SheepShaver.

If you can't select your rom file in Fusion's configuration editor, check that the Fusion folder and it's content is read/write enabled for your useraccount.

For support, please consult our Macintosh emulation forum.

FUSION was created by Jim Drew and Joe Fenton at Microcode Solutions. Version 3.0 was developed by Darek Mihocka at Emulators, Inc.